The visible work of Jorge Luis Borges may appear daunting (the citations, the obscure and illustrious names, so many of them apocryphal, the apparently abstruse subjects), but his legacy, I believe, is less in his erudite writing than in his companionable approach to literature. Borges was, as he often said, more of a reader than a writer, someone who not only told stories but transformed them through his perception. At a time when the electronic media insist on the value of speed over depth and instantaneous communication over past reflection, Borges reminds us that the craft of reading is a slow, quiet and endless happiness, a memorable occupation beyond practical reasons or allegiance to any theory. “I don't know exactly why I believe that a book brings us the possibility of happiness”, he once confessed. “But I am truly grateful for that modest miracle.” He thought it was our moral obligation to be happy (shortly before his death, he added “and to be just”), and, following his example, his readers have felt allowed to be guided not by duty but by pleasure.

Adolfo Bioy Casares, perhaps the person who knew Borges best, observed that “he never gave in to convention, custom or laziness”. He was a haphazard reader who felt content, at times, with plot summaries and articles in encyclopaedias, and who confessed that, even though he had never finished Finnegans Wake, he happily lectured on Joyce's linguistic monument. His gigantic memory allowed him to associate long-forgotten verses with other, better-known texts, and to enjoy certain writings because of a single word or because of the music of the language. He said he loved a commonplace line by the forgotten Argentinian writer Manuel Peyrou, because it mentioned Calle Nicaragua, a street close to where Borges was born, and he enjoyed reciting four verses by Rubén Darío, “Boga y boga en el lago sonoro, que en el sueño a los tristes espera, dónde aguarda una góndola de oro, a la novia de Luis de Baviera”, because the rhythm brought tears to his eyes. He was not above melodrama: in a crumbling Saxon chapel near Lichfield, he recited the Lord's Prayer in Old English “to give God a little surprise”.

He renewed the Spanish language. Since the seventeenth century, Spanish writers have hesitated between the linguistic poles of Góngora's baroque and Quevedo's severity; Borges developed for himself both a rich, multi-layered vocabulary of new poetic meanings and a deceptively simple, bare-boned style which (he said late in his career) attempted to mirror that of the young Kipling of Plain Tales from the Hills. Almost every major writer in Spanish this century has acknowledged a debt to Borges, and his literary voice echoed so strongly in the writings of the younger generations that the Argentinian novelist Manuel Mujica Láinez was moved to write the following quatrain:

A un joven escritor
Inútil es que te forjes
Idea de progresar
Porque aunque escribas la mar
Antes lo habrá escrito Borges.
(To a Young Poet
It's useless for you to foster
Any idea of advancement
Because even if you write huge quantities
Borges will have written it first.)

Borges's language and style came from conversation, from the civilized habit of sitting at a café table or over dinner with friends, and discussing the great eternal questions with humour and ingenuity. The nineteenth-century Argentine epic poem, Martín Fierro, ends with a sung duel between the hero and a challenging gaucho in which philosophical matters are addressed. In the poem, the scene is incongruous, but it does reflect a national inclination to converse, to put life into words. In other societies, the discussion of metaphysics over a cup of coffee may seem pretentious or absurd; not so in Argentina. Borges loved conversation and at meals would select what he called “unobtrusive fare”, white rice or pasta, so that the experience of eating would not distract him from the talk. He believed that what any man has experienced every man can experience, and he was not surprised to find, among his father's friends, a writer who, all on his own, had rediscovered the ideas of Plato and other philosophers. Macedonio Fernández wrote little, read little, but thought much and conversed brilliantly. He became, for Borges, the incarnation of pure thought: a man who, throughout long conversations in a café, would ask and attempt to solve the old metaphysical questions about time and existence, dreams and reality, which Borges was later to make his in book after book. For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. He was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years ago and which he believed would never end. Books restored the past.

The literary voice was, for Borges, always individual, never national, never of a group, and yet in that very voice (or voices) he invented a collective identity for the city in which he was born. From the baroque richness of one of his first books, Evaristo Carriego, to the laconic tones of stories such as “Death and the Compass” and “The Dead Man”, he constructed for Buenos Aires a cadence and a mythology with which the city is now identified. When Borges began writing, Buenos Aires (so far from Europe, the perceived centre of culture) felt vague and indistinct, and seemed to require a literary imagination to impose it upon reality. Borges recalled that when the now forgotten Anatole France visited Argentina in the 1920s, Buenos Aires felt “a little more real”, because Anatole France knew that it existed. Now Buenos Aires feels more real, because it exists in Borges's pages. The Buenos Aires Borges proposed to his readers is rooted in the neighbourhood of Palermo, where the family house stood; beyond the garden railings, Borges set his stories and poems of compadritos, local hoodlums whom he saw as low-life warriors and poets, and in whose violent lives he heard modest echoes of the Iliad and the ancient Viking sagas. The Buenos Aires of Borges is also the metaphysical centre of the world: on the nineteenth step leading to the cellar of Beatriz Viterbo's house, the Aleph can be seen, the point in which the entire universe is concentrated; the old National Library on Calle Mexico is the Library of Babel; the tiger at the Buenos Aires Zoo stands as a burning emblem of the perfection the writer must always be denied, even in dreams; the polished furniture and dark mirrors of the ancient mansions of Borges's Palermo threaten the reader who stares into them with the horror that one day they will reflect a face that will not be his.

Palermo stood for Buenos Aires; Buenos Aires for the universe. From this vague and distant city, it seemed as if Borges had thrown open the doors of the Universal Library, and all the marvel and mystery of the written word lay suddenly there, for the common taking. In a famous text whose first version was published in 1952, he wrote: “Every writer creates his own precursors.” With this statement, Borges adopted a long lineage of writers who now appear Borgesian avant la lettre: Plato, Novalis, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Remy de Gourmont, Chesterton. Even writers who seem beyond all individual claim, classics among classics, now belong to Borges's reading, like Cervantes after Pierre Menard. To a reader of Borges, even Shakespeare and Dante ring at times with a distinct Borgesian echo: the Provost's line in Measure for Measure about being “insensible of mortality, and desperately mortal”, and that verse in the fifth canto of Purgatorio that describes Buonconte “fugendo a pede e sanguinando il piano” are most certainly in Borges's hand.

This generous approach to literature (which he shared with Montaigne and Sir Thomas Browne and Lawrence Sterne) explains his appearance in so many different and scattered works now assembled under the common denominator of his presence: the first page of Michael Foucault's Les mots et les choses, which quotes a famous Chinese encyclopaedia (imagined by Borges) in which animals are divided into several incongruous categories, such as “those that belong to the Emperor” and “those that seen from afar resemble flies”; the character of the blind and criminal librarian who, under the name of Juan de Burgos, haunts the monastic library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose; the admiring and illuminating reference to Borges's 1932 text “The Translators of the Arabian Nights” in George Steiner's seminal book on translation, After Babel; the final lines of “A New Refutation of Time” spoken by the dying machine in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville; Borges's features blending with those of Mick Jagger in the final shot of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's failed 1968 film Performance; the encounter with the Wise Old Man of Buenos Aires in Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia and in Nicholas Rankin's Dead Man's Chest.

Michel Maxence, in a fine portrait of Borges published in L'Herne in 1964, pointed out that there are times in our history when, after too sudden advances, the sum of acquired knowledge seems suddenly stifling or overwhelming, and certain learned artists (créateurs érudits) come into being and lighten the gloomy prospect through a peculiar quality of humour and a renewed sense of storytelling. Maxence suggests that Borges is one of these luminous writers, and proposes, as other examples, Rabelais and Jarry; to these I think we can add Voltaire, Diderot and Dr Johnson, all of whom provide new standpoints from which to view the vast expanse of universal literature. Paradoxically, for Borges these writers (with the exception of Jarry, for whom he did not care) were not revolutionaries but conservative. “I don't know up to what point a writer can be revolutionary,” he remarked. “A writer works with language, which belongs to tradition.” Borges's memory carried a seemingly infinite number of books, but his material library was small and (like all the best libraries) disconcertaingly eclectic. He disliked Proust, Racine, Freud, Balzac, Lope de Vega, Stendhal, Goethe, Maupassant, Trollope and Lorca, and all these were absent from his shelves. He enjoyed quoting Mark Twain, who had said that “a good way to start a library” was “to leave out the works of Jane Austen”. For many years, until his death in 1986, his few books were housed in an unobtrusive sixth-floor apartment in the centre of Buenos Aires. Visitors (of which there were thousands, since, being blind, he hardly ever refused the offer of a reading voice) were met by Fani, the maid, and ushered into a small entrance hall and, through a curtained doorway, into the living-room where Borges would greet his guests with a weak and shy handshake. Without allowing for small talk, Borges would sit on a couch, gesture his guest to one of the facing armchairs, and the conversation would begin. Borges's blind eyes would stare into space as he spoke, allowing his guest's eyes to wander through the room, taking in the familiar objects of Borges's daily life. On the wall hung a painting by his sister, Norah Borges, of the Annunciation, and an engraving by Piranesi depicting mysterious circular ruins. A short corridor to the far left led to the bedrooms: his mother's, full of old photographs, and his own, simple as a monk's cell, with an iron bedstead, two bookcases and a single chair. On the wall of his bedroom hung a wooden plate with the coats of arms of the various cantons of Switzerland and Dürer's engraving “Knight, Death and the Devil”, which he had celebrated in two sonnets; on the bookcase stood a blue ceramic tiger.

The few bookcases, however, contained the essence of Borges's reading, beginning with those that held the encyclopaedias and dictionaries which were Borges's special pride. “I'll tell you a secret”, he would say to visitors. “I like to pretend I'm not blind and I lust for books like a man who can see. I even lust after new encyclopaedias and imagine I can follow the course of the rivers in their maps and find wonderful things in the different entries.” He liked to explain how, as a child, he had accompanied his father to the National Library (of which, as a blind man, he would later become the director) and, too timid to ask for a book, would simply take one of the volumes of the Britannica from the open stacks and read whatever article offered itself to his eyes. Sometimes he would be lucky, as on the day (he said) when he chose volume De-Dr and learned about the Druids, the Druzes and Dryden. He never abandoned this custom of trusting himself to the ordered chance of an encyclopaedia, and he spent many hours leafing through (or asking to be read from) odd volumes of the Garzanti, the Brockhaus, the Britannica or the Espasa-Calpe. The two low bookcases in the living-room held books by Stevenson, Chesterton, Henry James, Kipling, Shaw, De Quincey; J. W. Dunne's An Experiment with Time; several novels by Wells; Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone; various volumes by Eça de Queiroz in yellowing cardboard bindings; books by Lugones, Güiraldes and Groussac; Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; Vies Imaginaires by Marcel Schwob; detective novels by John Dickson Carr, Milward Kennedy and Richard Hull; Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi; Arnold Bennett's Buried Alive; a small paperback edition of David Garnett's Lady into Fox and The Man in the Zoo, with delicate line illustrations; the complete works of Oscar Wilde and the complete works of Lewis Carroll; Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes; the twelve volumes of Emerson's Works, the four volumes of Gibbon's Decline and Fall; various books on mathematics and philosophy, including several by Swedenborg and Schopenhauer, and Borges's beloved Wörterbuch der Philosophie by Fritz Mauthner. A few of these books had accompanied Borges since his adolescence; others, the ones in English and German, carried the labels of the now-vanished Buenos Aires bookstores where they had been bought: Mitchell's, Rodriguez, Pygmalion. Visitors would often be asked to search for one of these volumes and read out loud to him.

The bedroom housed books of poetry and one of the largest collections of Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic literature in Latin America. Here Borges kept the books in which he studied what he called “the harsh, laborious words, / That with a mouth turned to dust, / I used in my Northumberland and Mercia days, / Before I became Haslam or Borges”: Skeat's Dictionary, an annotated version of “The Battle of Maldon”, Richard Meyer's Altgermanische Religiöse Geschichte. The other bookcase held the poems of Enrique Banchs, of Heine, of San Juan de la Cruz, of Emily Dickinson, of Paul Toulon, and many annotated editions of Dante, by Benedetto Croce, Francesco Torraca, Luigi Pietrobono and Guido Vitali.

Absent from his bookshelves were his own books. He would proudly tell visitors who asked to see an early edition of one of them that he didn't possess a single volume “of such an eminently forgettable author”. (He didn't need them; though he pretended not to remember, he could recite by heart his poems of many decades earlier, and correct in his memory his own writings.) Once, the postman brought a large parcel containing a de luxe edition of his story “The Congress”, published in Italy by Franco Maria Ricci. It was a huge book, bound and cased in black silk with gold-leaf lettering and printed on hand-made blue Fabriano paper, each illustration (the text was accompanied by Tantric paintings) hand-tipped, and each copy numbered. Borges asked for a description. He listened carefully and then exclaimed: “But that's not a book, that's a box of chocolates!” and presented it to the embarrassed postman.

The generosity with which Borges unexpectedly coupled books and authors (Kim and the Don Segundo Sombra of Güiraldes, Aristotle and Nicholas Blake) extended to words, objects and ideas. He delighted in astonishing pairings (he often quoted Shakespeare's “a malignant and a turbaned Turk”) or in wonderfully heterodox catalogues such as the one that lists the consequences of importing black slaves to America: “Handy's blues, the success in Paris of the Uruguayan painter Dr. Pedro Figari, the fine rough prose of the equally Uruguayan Vicente Rossi, the mythological stature of Abraham Lincoln, the five hundred thosand dead of the American Civil War, the thirty-three hundred million spent on military pensions, the statue of the imaginary black soldier Falucho, the inclusion of the verb to lynch in the thirteenth edition of the Dictionary of the Spanish Academy of Letters, the impetuous film Halleluiah, the sturdy bayonet charge of Soler at the head of his black regiment at the Battle of Cerrito, the charm of Miss So-and-So, the black man who killed Martin Fíerro, the deplorable rumba The Peanut-Vendor, the arrested and jailed napoleonism of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the cross and the serpent in Haiti, the blood of the goats beheaded by the papaloi's machete, the habanera mother of the tango, the candomblé.” His friend Xul Solar, the Surrealist painter, aware of Borges's taste for odd couplings, urged Borges to experiment with gastronomical mixtures like chocolate and mustard, to see whether “cowardice and custom” had prevented society from discovering any such new and interesting combinations. “Alas,” Borges recalled, “we never came up with anything as perfect as, for instance, coffee and milk.”

Borges's critics, beginning as early as 1926, accused Borges of many things: of not being Argentinian (“being Argentinian”, Borges had said, “is an act of faith”); of suggesting, like Wilde, that art is useless; of not requiring literature to have a moral purpose; of being too fond of metaphysics and the fantastic; of preferring an interesting theory to the truth; of pursuing philosophical and religious ideas for their aesthetic value; of not being politically engaged (in spite of his strong stance against Peronism and Fascism) or of tolerating the wrong side (as when he shook hands with both Videla and Pinochet, acts for which he later apologized, signing his name to a plea for the desaparecidos). He dismissed these criticisms as attacks on his opinions (“the least important aspect of a writer”) and politics (“the most miserable of human activities”).

In September of 1952, in the eighty-third issue of Les Temps Modernes, the French critic Etiemble published an article on Borges under the title “Un homme à tuer”. By then, Borges had written some of his most important work—Ficciones, El Aleph, Inquisiciones and Otras Inquisiciones—and, according to Etiemble, these books left all other writers with one of two choices: either utterly to review their understanding of the literary act, forgoing received notions of history, genre and critical theory so rigorously studied since the eighteenth century, or to abandon literature completely. After Borges (after texts such as “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”, which argues that a book changes according to the reader's attributions, “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain” which suggests that one book can hold all others, “The Library of Babel”, which, in its very infinity, offers a complete catalogue of every conceivable book past, present and future), literature, as it was known until then, had become impossible. Borges, Etiemble urged, was to be eliminated if we were to continue to write.

Borges's concern was literature, and no writer, in this vociferous century, was as important in changing our relationship to literature as he was. Perhaps other writers were more adventurous, keener in their travelling through our secret geographies. No doubt there were those who documented more powerfully than he ever did our social miseries and rituals, as there were those who ventured more successfully into the Amazonian regions of our psyche. Borges attempted little or nothing of all this. Instead, throughout his long life, he drew maps for us to read those other explorations—especially in the realm of his favourite literary genre, the fantastic, which in his books included religion, philosophy and higher mathematics. There are writers who attempt to put the world in a book. There are others, rarer, for whom the world is a book, a book that they attempt to read for themselves and for others. Borges was one of these writers.

He trusted the written word, in all its fragility, and through his example, he granted us, his readers, access to that infinite library which others call the universe.